Tuesday, April 19, 2016

KEY TO VOTER TURNOUT: EXCITING CANDIDATES, CONTESTS

In election after election, California
officialdom has been frustrated by low levels of interest among eligible
voters. Just when they were beginning to feel like they had tried almost
everything, the obvious solutions to the problem appeared spontaneously:

Give eligible Californians
exciting, meaningful contests and they will turn out. When they feel their
votes matter, they will fill out ballots, either at home or in polling booths.

That’s why, instead of wringing hands and whining about
irresponsible voters not performing their important duty, all of a sudden this
spring state election officials are worried about seeing too many voters.

That’s the clear upshot of an appeal
by Secretary of State Alex Padilla, California’s top election official, for
more money to stage the June primary. In April, he warned of a turnout “surge”
and asked Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature for an additional $32 million to
pay for more and fatter election guides for the November election, plus added
funds to help counties cope with an anticipated flood of voters both then and
in June.

The two presidential nomination races
have produced massive turnouts so far this year across the county, and Padilla
realizes California will be the same – in fact it may see a higher percentage
increase than anywhere else.

One reason is that in recent
pre-Donald Trump, pre-Bernard Sanders days, there was little excitement or
pizzazz in the state’s elections for 10 years, since Arnold Schwarzenegger’s
last run for governor in 2006. Even then there wasn’t much of a contest, as
Democratic rival Phil Angelides essentially got swamped.

Likewise, there was virtually no
contest in 2014, when turnout dropped almost 25 percent from the presidential
election voting levels of 2012. In that vote, Brown easily beat his Republican
rival Neel Kashkari, a former Federal Reserve banker who has since taken a new
role in the national central bank.

The extreme low 2014 turnout did two
things, causing the number of signatures required for putting initiatives onto
the ballot to drop by more than a quarter and pushing officialdom to consider
desperate measures.

That low vote is behind a current plan
to automatically register any U.S. citizen getting a drivers’ license as a
voter. It also explains proposals to allow online voting, despite the hackable
history of allegedly secure computer systems from credit cards to government
records and national security secrets.

The real way to spur turnout isn’t
anything risky like that. Rather, it’s to make elections meaningful. California
legislators could begin by moving the state’s presidential primary up
permanently to a slot just after New Hampshire. True, other states won’t like
that, because candidates would have to spend time in California rather than the
much smaller South Carolina or Minnesota or Tennessee, all among states that
voted this year either in mid-February or early March.

It’s long been a situation of the tail
wagging the dog, as for the last 44 years – since George McGovern used
California to win the 1972 Democratic nomination – no California presidential
vote has meant much, until this year’s.

The rare happenstance of no candidate
being sufficiently appealing to seal a party nomination until the very last day
of the primary season – if then – is the reason California’s vote suddenly
emerged as important. That hadn’t happened in 44 years. So leave the state’s
presidential primary in June and California will mostly likely wander another
40 years in the desert of irrelevancy.

Not every nominating season will be as
exciting as this one: For one thing, the White House is about to be vacated by
its incumbent resident, so both parties are nominating now. For another, unique
personalities like Trump and Sanders don’t come along in every election cycle.

The implications of all this for
routine elections around California are also clear. Match exciting candidates
against each other and potential voters will become interested enough to become
regular voters. Allow elections to be virtually uncontested, as many have been,
and interest will wane. The same when voters get the sense that certain
candidates appear to be anointed.

The bottom line: When voters feel
their ballots matter, they will make casting them a priority. When they don’t
feel that way, voters won’t bother.

-30-

Email
Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough,
The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch
It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias
columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

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About Me

Thomas Elias writes the syndicated California Focus column, appearing twice weekly in 88 newspapers around California, with circulation over 2.2 million.
He has won numerous awards from organizations like the National Headliners Club, the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the Los Angeles Press Club, and the California Taxpayers Association. He has been nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize in distinguished commentary.
Elias is the author of two books, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It" (now in its third edition; also published in Japanese and recently optioned for a television movie) and "The Simpson Trial in Black and White," co-authored with the late Dennis Schatzman.